Albatron GF4 Ti4280 - In the box
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Albatron Ti4280PV 128MB
What does the "PV" stand for? I don't exactly know what "P" stands for but I know it differentiates the 64MB version and the 128MB version of the card. The "V" stands for the Video In and Video Out capabilities of the card. Having video in would come in handy at times, especially when you edit videos and images. As a old school RPG game freak, I would connect my old PSone and play my games on my computer. I'll never have to leave my seat!
The card does not have any extravagant looks to it, nothing shiny and fashionable. The card, however, does have a very nice blue PCB. Since blue is my favorite color, it's already a plus for me.
Being a cooling freak, the first thing that I did was remove the stock heat sink fan.
From there you can see that Albatron has done a good job with applying sufficient thermal paste. It made full contact with the entire GPU. Wiping off the applied silicone grease left marks on the bottom surface of the heat sink. It doesn't come off cleanly. You can see from the picture that it smeared.
Here is a shot of the GPU after I cleaned off the silicone grease.
The card did not come with any ram sinks. Personally, I think ram sinks are a must for a video card. I've touched the ramchips while the computer is on; and trust me, these things get hot! Albatron has chosen to use the Samsung ramchips for this video card. Samsung has gained a pretty good reputation with their ramchips. Looking closely, the ram is rated to run at 3.6ns. A quick calculation (1000/3.6 = 278 * 2 = 556MHZ DDR) shows that the memory is capable to run at 556MHZ.
What Came With The Card
The card came nicely packaged with a decent instructions manual that comes in many different languages (mainly Asian languages), a driver CD, some software from Cyberlink, and two games (rather old games). Overall, the package was pretty simple. The games are so old that I would rather have them just leave it out. What's the use? Another coaster on the desk? Then there are the cables. Albatron makes sure that you have what you need to connect your camcorder or your TV, whatever your needs. One thing they forgot to include is a DVI to CRT connector. It would be come in handy when two monitors are being used.
The Software
These are the screenshots of what shows up when you pop in the installation cd.
As you can see, there is an option to install the Albatron Overclocking Tool. The tool simply installs a registry tweak that allows you to overclock--much like Coolbits. Here is a screenshot of the card under AGP 8x in wcpuid.
Next: Comparison and Benchmarks >>
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